Category ISIL

How Many Troops?

Now things are getting interesting: pentagon-considering-recommending-combat-troops-in-syria

Hard to imagine that it would not be tens of thousands, as one has to provide a supply route and have enough force to engaged ISIL (which has been estimated to be at 20,000 or more guerillas). I gather the area of operations would cover half of Syria, parts of Northern Iraq (at least to Mosul) and the supply routes would be probably have to go through Turkey.

Of course, the Assad government in Syria has troops there, along with Hezbollah, Iranian volunteers, Kurdish volunteers and Russia. This could get very complicated.

Timeline for Mosul and Raqqa

OK, we now have a new timeline for the taking of Mosul (and Raqqa): us-commander-mosul-raqqa-retaken-6-months

A few highlights:

  1. U.S. commander in Iraq, U.S. Army Lt. General Stephan Townsend, said “within the next six months I think we’ll see both (the Mosul and Raqqa campaigns) conclude.”
  2. Fight for the western half of Mosul to begin in days.
  3. “But on the ground inside Mosul, Iraqi troops said as they neared the Tigris, IS fighters launched few car bombs and largely fled their advances—unlike the heavy resistance they faced in the first few weeks of combat inside the city.”
  4. “ISIL morphing into an insurgent threat, that’s the future,” Townsend said.
  5. Concerning Raqqa: “What we would expect is that within the next few weeks the city will be nearly completely isolated….”

Anyhow……keep waiting for the point when ISIL realizes that an insurgency can’t hold ground forever against a conventional force and decides to go back to being an guerrilla force. This offensive is taking a very long time.

 

East Mosul Taken

By the way, amid all the discussion in the news on crowd sizes, Eastern Mosul fell, sort of. Article here: Iraqi-forces-complete-control-eastern-mosul

Highlights:

  1. “The deputy parliament speaker [of Iraq] announced the capture of the east of the city.”
  2. “Mopping-up operations were still under way on Monday….”
  3. “The west side of Mosul could prove more complicated to take than the east as it is crisscrossed by streets too narrow for armored vehicles.”
  4. “Iraq forces estimated the number of militants inside the city at 5,000 to 6,000 at the start of operations three months ago, and says 3,300 have been killed in the fighting since.”
  5. Took 100 days from the start of the campaign. Two weeks to get there and twelve weeks to clear the east side of the city.

CTS Reaches Tigris In Mosul

Mosul districts liberated by Iraqi Security Forces (in green), as of 7 January 2016 [Ninevah Media Center]

A spokesman for the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service (CTS) announced that CTS units reached the eastern bank of the Tigris River in central Mosul today, securing a damaged bridge over the river. The Tigris runs north-south through the center of the city. Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) have made steady progress against stiff Daesh opposition since renewing offensive operations on 27 December 2016.

Though the battle is far from over, recent gains suggest that ISF might be winning the battle of attrition with the vastly outnumbered defenders. However, it likely will still be some time before ISF fully occupies and secures the city.

Iraqi Time

Nothing earthshaking here, but I just liked the article for its quote: “In terms of timeline, we’re on Iraqi time, this is going to take some time.”

Article is here: general-sees-islamic-states-capability-waning

A few highlights:

  1. ISIL is starting to run out of resources in the third month of the campaign.
  2. Second phase of the campaign started last week after a month of deadlock and is making slow progress.
  3. “They’ve got a finite amount of resource that are on the eastern side and the fact that their capability is waning indicates that those resources are starting to dwindle.”
  4. “…the Mosul campaign was on track, but ‘in terms of timeline, we’re on Iraqi time. This is going to take some time.'”

Anyhow, still not sure how ISIL is going to manage to pull anything positive out of this effort. With over 100,000 troops with air support, it is hard to imagine that the coalition is not going to take Mosul in the near future.

 

Economics of Warfare 5

Examining the fifth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This lecture is about regressions and logistics regressions. Now, I think everyone should take a econometrics course….but just a warning, this is all pretty dry stuff. So, if you choose to skip it, don’t blame you.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%205.pdf

On the other hand, what he is discussing is using regression models to analyze the nature of the civilian casualties, including in the Rwandan genocide. This gets a little hard to discuss. On slide 11, you can learn that in the Kibuye Prefecture in 1994 there were 31,117 people killed by machete, 9,779 killed by clubs and 442 burned alive. Not exactly relaxing reading.

Slide 20 tracks Israeli and Palestinian deaths from 2000-2005, which is a lot less.

Anyhow, Dr. Spagat’s work often focuses on civilian casualties. These are often a significant part of warfare, even if we don’t particularly like to address it. For example,. the United States lost over 4,000 troops in Iraq 2003-2011. Iraq lost over 150,000 people during that time. The same pattern for Vietnam, where the United States lost over 58,000 people in what was the third bloodiest war in our history. Vietnam lost one to two million people !

I did attempt to address civilian casualties in our insurgency work. It is also addressed in my book America’s Modern Wars in Chapter 9 “Rules of Engagement and Measurements of Brutality” and Chapter 15 “The Burden of War.” I am not sure that this attention to civilian casualties was fully appreciated by our DOD customers, but it was there because sadly, it is always a significant part of warfare. Tragically, sometimes so is genocide, as recently demonstrated by ISIL. Dr. Spagat, in a course on the “Economics of Warfare,” is quite correct to focus on civilian casualties.

P.S. I have been informed by Dr. Spagat that he still has another ten lectures to post up on his blog.

 

Fresh Advance in Mosul

By the way, there is still a war going on in Iraq, and it is going slowly. The Iraqi’s actually made a good timely advance up to the city, isolated the city, entered east Mosul….and then things have slow down…considerably….immeasurably: Fresh Advance in Mosul

To summarize:

  1. They have 1/4 of Mosul.
  2. They will start advancing again in a couple of days.
  3. Americans will be deployed in the city and with the units.
  4. It was a planned “operational refit” (should I take this statement at face value?)
  5. “A heavily armoured unit of several thousand federal police was redeployed from the southern outskirts two weeks ago to reinforce the eastern front after army units advised by the Americans suffered heavy losses in an Islamic State counter-attack.”
  6. Three U.S. servicemen have been killed in northern Iraq in the past 15 months.
  7. The article states that there are up to 1.5 million people still in Mosul. This is higher than some other estimates I have seen.